For those without video: basically, what happened was that after Joe Biden Opened His Mouth and announced that voting against the President’s job bill would result in more rapes in Flint, Michigan, Jason Mattera of Human Events confronted the Vice President on Biden’s statement. If you watch the video, you’ll see that Mattera ‘ambushed’ VP Biden by cruelly saying the magic word ‘picture:’ this of course caused Biden to go into full Pavlovian politician mode… thus freezing him for just long enough for Mattera to ask Biden on the record whether that language was appropriate for a sitting Vice President. Biden then attempted to push out a cloud of link by standing by his statement that rapes were up three times in Flint – which, by the way, Factcheck.org calls a ‘whopper;’ i.e., a lie – and then made a hasty retreat.

Joe Biden’s office has complained to the Senate press gallery about a confrontation the vice president had with a conservative journalist last week on Capitol Hill.

Biden aides asked whether Senate rules were broken in the wake of the contentious exchange between the vice president and the reporter.

For the record: Mattera was wearing press credentials and is unapologetic about the fact that he was uninterested in making Biden love him for his marvelous questioning style. Which is as it should be, given that our elected officials are… elected officials. They’re not members of the nobility, or deities, or indeed anything except fellow-citizens of the Republic who are in fact well-compensated for their work. If Joe Biden doesn’t like that, well, nobody’s forcing him to be Vice President of the United States of America.

Besides, God knows that the press isn’t shy about going for the gotcha moment for my party’s politicians, so if the real message here is that “Joe Biden’s too stupid to be left to wander around without a keeper” then that’s good to know, too.